Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Welcome to Weirdsville: Snowball's Chance In Hell

From
the mythological specter of the doughboy who can only breathe mustard
gas, to the coincidence of the crossword puzzle containing the code
words for the Normandy landing, conflict can bring out both the best,
and the downright strangest, in human behavior and belief. So much so,
that it would take much more than this little slice of cyberspace for me
to outline them all. Just limiting ourselves to inventiveness still
packs weirdsville to it's sprawling borders: the American kamikaze bats
with their still-classified incendiary explosives, the stone-skipping
delivery of the British dam-busting bombs, the around-the-corner Nazi
submachine gun, Patton's phantom army, and the War Magicians, which is
one of my faves: a group of British dance-hall conjurers who put their
slight-of-hand talents to work making tanks into trucks, trucks into
tanks, everything else into something else, all to trick the Axis.

One
of my all-time favorites, though, was the one that just, almost, nearly
happened. But before I reveal this glorious monument to inventive
mania, a little about its inventor.

Like many British eccentrics, Geoffrey Pyke
at first appears normal when viewed through Who's Who, but a closer
examination always starts the head shaking. Not to say that Pyke didn't
give his all and then some to the war effort - not at all. But it also
would be incorrect to say that what Pyke did give could be called, at
best, quirky - and, at best, bizarre.

Apprehended
trying to sneak into Berlin during the first World War, Pyke was
sentenced to a prison camp. By noting that sunlight momentarily blinded
his guards every day at one certain location, Pyke managed to escape,
becoming something of a celebrity by accounting his daring escapades
after the war.

Assigned to the War Office
during the second great conflict, Pyke threw himself into devising all
kinds of clever (and even often practical) means of aiding the war
effort. Stretcher-carrying sidecars for motorcycles? That was Pyke.
Pedal-powered shunt cars for railway yards? Pyke. Marking a special
motorized cart British commandos were to use with "Officer's Latrine" in
German on them -- so the Nazi's would leave it well alone? You guessed
it ... Geoffrey Pyke. Disguising British agents as avid golfers, and
then sending them all throughout Germany to secretly gather signatures
on a poll to convince Hitler that his people didn't want to go to war?
You guessed it. Like I said, quirky at best.

But
the concept that propelled Pyke from simple, fascinating, oddity to the
military limits of the delightfully absurd was the one he hit on while
pondering one of the great problems of the Second World War: that allied
shipping was being literally cut to pieces by the merciless, and
precise, German submarine fleet. Even Kaiser with his smooth assembly
line of cheap shipping couldn't compete with the appetites of the Wolf
Packs.

What was needed, Pyke considered, was some kind of strong
military presence, a way of providing air cover for the
desperately-needed merchant ships.

But there
were a lot of Liberty Ships, far too many to cover with even a token
fleet. Not only did those transport need protection, but they needed
cheap and easy protection, something simple to assemble, able to carry
long-range aircraft, and not so expensive as to draw valuable resources
from the battle fronts.

It would be easy to imagine Pyke sipping something cool when inspiration struck. But
what really causes the head to shake is to remember that Pyke was a
great British eccentric, and Brits (as anyone who has visited the UK can
attest) are completely alien to anything tall, cool, and – especially -
frosty.

Maybe it was watching winter slabs
majestically move down the Thames, or pale masses of crystals sluice
down a gutter, but whatever the inspiration, Pyke had his vision. But
before it could be put into anything even close to reality, Pyke had to
solve one fundamental problem: ice melts.

Pyke's
vision was a marvelous, gloriously absurd one: 300 feet wide, 2,000
long mid-Atlantic runways. Displacing 1,800,000 tons of water (26 times
the Queen Elizabeth), they would carry aircraft, munitions, crew, and -
naturally - a refrigeration system that would guarantee that their 50
foot walls wouldn't fall to their greatest enemy (even more than
Germany): heat.

These
iceberg battleship/aircraft carriers would have been the stuff of
nightmares: massive white slabs of steaming ice, churning through the
sea, a flurry of aircraft and support ships darting around their bulk.
The Germans, my guess, would quake in fear more from the audacity and
insanity of their concept than any weapons they could carry.

But these tamed bergs wouldn't just depend on their mass and aircraft to defeat the German hordes. No
sir, these were fightin' icebergs! Pyke envisioned a special system
mated to the refrigeration equipment so the bergs could spray out
supercold water, literally freezing enemy forces in their tracks. Code
named Habbakuk after a character in the Bible known for saying: "I am
doing a work in your days which you would not believe if told." To know
truth, Preachers say, study the Bible. How very true in this case.

But
there was that big stumbling block to Pyke's incredible plans: his
terrifying, freezing giants of the sea would turn to mid-Atlantic slush
before ever encountering the Germans. The humiliation alone of having to
scream for help as your ship literally melted around you was more than
any sailor should ever bear. So, how to make nature act ... unnaturally?

The
answer actually came from Max Perutz, who named it after Pyke: take 14%
sawdust and 86% water, freeze, and viola: a bizarre material you can
saw like wood and won’t melt. Well, okay, it actually will melt, but just a helleva lot slower than regular ice.

Pyke
was so excited by this frosty invention that he showed the stuff to
Lord Mountbatten, who was so similarly afflicted that he rushed into
Winston Churchill's bathroom and in a scene too close to Monty Python to
be anything but real, dropped a block of the stuff in the PM's bath
water. Maybe it was the audacity, the lunacy, of the idea, or some
unknown properties of Pykete, but Churchill caught the bug: Pyke and his
iceberg navy got the go-ahead.

A site was
found, a secret boat-house on Patricia Lake in Canada, and a small-size
test was organized. Pyke was ecstatic as his materials were assembled
into a model of his cold revelation. As a testament to either Pyke's
brilliance or the twisted humor of the universe, the ice ship was a
complete success: in other words, it didn't melt all through a hot
summer.

Alas, the landings at Normandy made
the ice ships unnecessary. It's easy to imagine Pyke, face beaming in
joy, standing on the frigid deck of his dream ship, envisioning its
monstrous kin rolling through surging seas, throwing cascades of
freezing death at the German Navy, just as somewhere else in the world
the war was turning away from needing their frightening, protective
presence.

As to what Pyke did after the war,
it's hard for me to say: his strange dream of a frozen navy lasting
longer than anything else he contributed.

But one thing I can guarantee:
Pyke could never see the onset of winter without thinking of his great
ships, and the battles they might have won.

Reel Monsters

Dark Doings at Miskatonic U

Welcome To Weirdsvlle

Love Without Gun Control

Calling M.Christian versatile is a
tremendous understatement. Extensively published in science fiction, fantasy,
horror, thrillers, and even non-fiction, it is in erotica that M.Christian has
become an acknowledged master, with stories in such anthologies as
Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bisexual
Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and in fact too many anthologies, magazines, and
sites to name.In erotica,
M.Christian is known and respected not just for his passion on the page but
also his staggering imagination and chameleonic ability to successfully and
convincingly write for any and all orientations.

But M.Christian has other tricks up
his literary sleeve: in addition to writing, he is a prolific and respected
anthologist, having edited 25 anthologies to date including the Best S/M
Erotica series; Pirate Booty; My Love For All That Is Bizarre: Sherlock Holmes
Erotica; The Burning Pen; The Mammoth Book of Future Cops, and The Mammoth Book
of Tales of the Road (with Maxim Jakubowksi); Confessions, Garden of Perverse,
and Amazons (with Sage Vivant), and many more.

M.Christian's short fiction has been
collected into many bestselling books in a wide variety of genres, including
the Lambda Award finalist Dirty Words and other queer collections like Filthy
Boys, BodyWork, and his best-of-his-best gay erotica book, Stroke the
Fire.He also has collections of
non-fiction (Welcome to Weirdsville, Pornotopia, and How To Write And Sell
Erotica); science fiction, fantasy and horror (Love Without Gun Control); and
erotic science fiction including Rude Mechanicals, Technorotica, Better Than
The Real Thing, and the acclaimed Bachelor Machine.

As a novelist, M.Christian has shown
his monumental versatility with books such as the queer vamp novels Running Dry
and The Very Bloody Marys; the erotic romance Brushes; the science fiction
erotic novel Painted Doll; and the rather controversial gay horror/thrillers
Finger's Breadth and Me2.

M.Christian is also the Associate
Publisher for Renaissance eBooks,
where he strives to be the publisher he'd want to have as a writer, and to help
bring quality books (erotica, noir, science fiction, and more) and authors out
into the world.